I offer you a glimpse inside No 10

I am in Toronto, for reasons that will become clear in the coming hours.

In the meantime, however, the splendid Lucy Pepper has done this drawing of Nick 'n' Dave's first night at No. 10.  Troubled Diva, Katy Newton and I are lucky that she is our friend, because when we shout (on Twitter, no less! We are so modern) things like "are they in single beds are they?" or "they are in bunkbeds!" or "they are in single beds with their names over them like Bert and Ernie!",  Lucy Pepper can just DRAW IT, like this, and make anything anyone had in their heads a hundred times better by adding rosy cheeks and rabbit slippers.

Brilliant.

. 

I would like to make the world be made of cheese

It is rare that I do this but I think everyone in the world should be aware of the list of things that Tallulah would like to do when she is no longer a tiny child. Tallulah is, I believe, the daughter of the splendid KatyBoo whose blog I very much enjoy, particularly when sated with gin.

That is all from me, for I must go and (in the words of Tallulah):

get a dog

or mayby kitens

I answer more reader questions, much to their screaming delight

Is there no end to the good news? Yes! It is true!  After Sunday's extraordinarily successful first foray into answering the questions of my adoring readers and/or fans, I am answering some more today.  So far I think it's going pretty well.

I am not sure what you think, but it is Tuesday so you have the rest of the week to decide, and if you don't like the questions then I cannot help you until tomorrow, when I will be using the words 'crustacean' and 'carapace' in one blog post whilst holding a linen handkerchief doused in cologne over my retching mouth.

So. To the questions. They are good ones, I must confess. We start with the magnificent Y S Lee.

Why Hula Hoops?

Delicious texture: so super-crunchy, then they stick in your teeth.  Salty. Can put them on the end of your fingers even if you are old and your fingers are fat like gigantic pork sausages.

3 things that need to be invented.

1. Funnel thing for putting peppercorns into your pepper mill;
2. An interesting newspaper for Canada;
3. A beaver pet shop and a new paradigm* of what is and isn't acceptable in the pet world, i.e. it becomes socially acceptable for me to buy a small beaver and bring it up so that I can train it to sit on my lap, fetch twigs, not chew trees (unless permitted), lie on its back to have its tummy tickled, call it Graham, be microchipped, accept tiny snacks from my soft receiving hands, etc.


Sting's ultimate fate (deserved).

He will be eating an organic trout out of his own organic yoga lake in his organic farm in Tuscany when an organic trout bone will stick in his stupid Geordie neck.

Trudie will leap to her feet in a  tantric style and will attempt (and succeed) the Heimlich manoeuvre. The bone will shoot out of the preening cockmonkey's suspiciously taut organic yoga neck, bouncing into his organic rubber yoga ball, only to rebound and shoot into his eye and from there, into his tiny brain.

Astonishingly, the organic yoga fishbone will then find its target (i.e., Sting's tiny brain) despite having to travel through his eye and thence his brain (which is mostly made of tofu) causing an immediate and painless death.  




Tracy Lynn asks:  I will admit to some curiosity as to what ever happened to that fat bastard of a cat you were housing in Brixton.

Fat bastard of a cat (aka Monster) was gathered up (i.e., stuffed into a cat carrying basket despite gigantic roars of protest) by MonkeyMother and my friend Sonia and taken to a nice cat rehousing centre. MonkeyMother claims to have had a report that he was last seen sprawling in great comfort on a bed somewhere in Bromley, but I know what she is like and I would not be surprised if "a bed somewhere in Bromley" is MonkeyMother speak for "gone to the great Cattery in the sky".



Can you name us your top ten dinner party guests, living or dead. 
I have thought about this for a bit and the conclusion is that it would be people who I already know, like, and don't see enough of, although I'd like to have Sting round for dinner so I could wee in his soup.

Lord Philth asks:

Have you ever farted loudly in a supermarket (Montreal or elsewhere)?
Not loudly, no. 



Jam or marmalade?
Both, but only the ones out of the actual jam and marmalade making hands of either me or my mother, MonkeyMother.

Have you ever been too lazy to take the wrapper off an Opal Fruit (Starburst) and eat it "as is"? 
Yes, but only once. Excellent question. Strange but definitely not unpleasant, and I swallowed the paper, too.


Some questions from Anonymous:

What would you do or where would you go if you were invisible for one day?
I would go to Sting's house and I would wee in his soup.

Have you ever been sick through your nose?
Yes, and it hurts like all the worst fires of hell.  Almost as bad is when you burp and are a bit sick in your mouth. Awful.



Are there any circumstances that would justify a Genesis reunion (inc Peter Gabriel)
Yes, pretty much any and I would welcome it in some ways. I do not hate Genesis. I just hate the endless Genesis that goes on and on and on and on (although I like this after the stupid bit at the beginning). I don't hate it as much as I hate the Yes that goes on and on and on and on, mind you, so I don't think there would be any excuse for a Yes reunion, particularly as from what I understand Jon Anderson is a right twat.

(A little known fact about the early Monkey years is that MonkeyFather used to punish us (i.e., me and my brother, RunningMonkey), with prog rock; if we were really bad, we were locked in the basement with no supper and "Yessongs" on repeat.  I will write more about this another day. The pain is still a bit too alive in my memory, as it were.)

Who in your esteemed opinion is the biggest preening cockmonkey in advertising?
Easy, but I cannot say it in public. He is in New York and he really is a gigantic twat.



Do you play a musical instrument?
No, but I fancy the Jew's Harp might be "my" instrument, were I to play one.

Sama writes:

I would like to know WHEN you discovered that you were simian, ditto your family, and how?
We have always known. How and why I cannot explain. We just have.

* people use this word in advertising agencies a lot without really knowing what it means. "We are going to create a new paradigm for communications strategies", for e.g.  Amazing.

I find some rules I like

I do not like rules much, partly because a lot of them don't make much sense. I'm not including things like "drive on the correct side of the road", or "write thank-you letters", because those are things that are to do with being polite and/or not killing other people.  No no.  I'm talking about the kind of rules that aren't really necessary, or have been decided and set in stone by someone in a different time and context and followed blindly by people without the imagination to question them, or the desire to change them to make things better.

Do not be afraid; I am not going to start bellowing things like "rules are there to be broken!!" like an enormous spanner, but a bit like deadlines or guidelines or people in positions of authority, if rules make sense I will follow them; if they don't, I won't. (Assuming no-one will get hurt.)

I have done those Myers-Briggs things twice in five years. In that time, I have apparently undergone a complete personality transplant, which is encouraging; the second time, it was even mildly interesting, for I found out that I am a rare and special (obviously)  INTJ. If you do not know much about Myers-Briggs, that means that I am a socially awkward engineer called General Ulysses S Grant who rejects formal notions of what you "should" do, some of which has a glimmer of truth about it as far as I am concerned. Anyway, we shall now draw a veil over the whole affair, partly because I find discussion of IQ, EQ, MENSA, Myers-Briggs etc etc etc very dull. ("But I have an IQ of 145!". "You are still a fucking twat, though, aren't you?")

Back to the point, if there is one:  I have just found a splendid thing in The Guardian that you probably all saw when it came out in February. It is Ten rules for writing fiction; not just one set of ten rules, lots of sets of ten rules from lots of different writers. I think you will like it a lot, whether you write fiction or not.  I liked a great many of them, but I liked these two best (from Richard Ford):

1.  Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.

10. Don't take any shit if you can possibly help it.

Obviously you can subsitute "writer" for whatever it is you do in the first one but still, you get the point.

Pip pip!

NWM

I am immensely pleased by a traffic light

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